John Yau reviews Angela Dufresne: Let’s Stay Together at Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, on view through November 2, 2014.

Yau writes: "as this exhibition proves, [Dufresne] has a remarkable narrative gift, which is different from being anecdotal, telling a story, or citing disparate cultural sources, all of which she has already done. Dufresne’s narratives are direct and opaque, funny and sinister, seemingly ordinary and downright weird, creepy and mysterious. But their real strength is that you cannot extract a story from them – that you can’t reduce what you see into some tale that you can take with you. The paintings in Let’s Stay Together neither illustrate a methodology nor are they a secret code that you have to decipher. The artist has shed her tendency to make work that feels claustrophobic, and at the same time she has introduced an unsettling feeling that gets under your skin."